Chuck Todd: Too late for Obama to ‘disqualify Mitt Romney,’ has to ‘requalify himself’

With the presidential election headed into its final stages after Monday night’s debate in Boca Raton, Fla., MSNBC’s Chuck Todd says President Barack Obama has lost the window of opportunity to attack Mitt Romney, and is now forced to have to “requalify” himself to be president.

“The problem for the Obama campaign is what happened in that first debate,” Todd, the NBC White House correspondent and host of MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown”, said Tuesday on “Morning Joe”.

“And the point you just brought up, which is the president let him do it at the first debate, didn’t call him on it, didn’t try to push back, didn’t try to have a debate and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute’ — and then has been trying to make up the ground since. Now you say, how do you call it on him now in the last two weeks? Look, the president’s got bigger problems than trying to disqualify Mitt Romney now. The president has to requalify himself for a second term. I think they’ve made that decision.”

Todd said that, if Obama loses this election, it will because of those missed opportunities to take on Romney.

“I think that’s why you see the closing argument style of advertising that they have, that’s being unveiled today,” Todd said. “It’s Obama candid in the camera. You look at the president’s closing statement last night. I think they now realize that they don’t have — two weeks is not enough time to have the conversation with voters that they want to have. He missed his opportunity. He blew it in that first debate. If the president tactically, if they lose this election, tactically, the biggest mistake will be the president’s performance in that first debate because it gave him the room to do that.”

“If Romney loses, by the way, then we will say tactically –it will go to Joe’s first point to me which is, if he was going to move to the center, why didn’t he do it at the more traditional time, at the convention and use his convention to do it rather than wait until the last minute? He was playing with fire there.”